(3) Progress Continues...

Over the last couple of weeks we have been slowly getting ourselves ready for the trip; booking ferries to Morocco, flights home and sorting out the various other bits of preparation that will make the trip easier. What you, may wonder, is the sort of thing that you need to worry about on a trip like ours?

Well, first and foremost is the car. As we are planning to be ‘off the beaten track’ as much as possible - and as last time I checked the AA did not venture into north Africa - we need to be confident in our abilities to get the car going and keep it going. To this end I got hold of a second hand Haynes manual for the car from Amazon (not only cheaper but, being slightly oil stained, I thought it might give us an air of mechanical credibility). Sue has spent a day at her local garage learning things automotive so that she can supervise me more effectively should we have need to open it.

We have also needed a couple of minor modifications to the car. Firstly a locking fuel cap is recommended: there are stories of some cars having had sugar added into their tanks in more remote areas by less than honest locals in order to cause a ‘breakdown’. This forces people to have to abandon their cars in the middle of nowhere and these cars are then promptly ‘recovered’ by said locals for their own gain. The second - and probably more important modification - is the fitting of some form of sump protection under the engine. Owing to the state of some of the tracks we will be following there is every chance that we will be scraping the bottom of the engine against the ground in some of the rougher areas, especially as we are in a low slung, two wheel drive car. This is of course a potentially bad thing. I envisaged a thin sheet of steel connected to the chassis and passing under the engine. Having seen the piece of industrial engineering that we now have under the car it seems Sue had other ideas: I am pretty sure she has pulled in a few favours with her contacts and that somewhere out there now sits a Challenger Main Battle tank stripped of its Chobham armour plating. I must admit I am now beginning to worry slightly about what she meant when she was talking about sorting the ‘turret attachment’…

In the spirit of approaching this trip in a professional manner we have also started a ‘lessons identified’ log. Here are the first two entries:

Always wear the correct clothing. You can not refill a car with a locking petrol cap when the key is in your other coat. 

Emergency tyre sealant foam is highly effective but more so when the hose on the can is attached to a tyre prior to use: don’t drop them - they tend to go off.